"COLLINS' TERRORIST AS HERO

Barbara Shulgasser, EXAMINER MOVIE CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Friday, October 25, 1996

"MICHAEL COLLINS" is the epic story of the Irish rebellion leader who was killed by an Irish republican soldier,in 1922 at the age of 31, after having invented guerrilla warfare in the streets of Dublin. His terrorist tactics, like those of the Irgun in Palestine of the 1940s and the PLO of more recent times, helped bring world attention to his country's situation. His work helped force the English to cede authority in some parts of Ireland and begin the movement for an independent republic.

With that said, and knowing only that Collins was a hero to the Irish, I expected this biographical movie by the Irish writer-director Neil Jordan to demonstrate the man's singular greatness. And although that greatness is patently undemonstrated here - in fact questioned - in the end Collins is portrayed by Jordan nevertheless as if things in Ireland weren't still a bloody mess, and as if Collins didn't have something to do with that unfortunate state of affairs.

Collins is played by the hale and hearty Liam Neeson, who won best actor at the Venice Film Festival and is surely bring thought of for an Oscar. His Collins is shown to have been a patriot who was grievously compromised by his dedication to ending British rule in his homeland. For diversion from the politics, Jordan throws in a decorative Julia Roberts as a more or less unnecessary romantic involvement.

After a disastrous military defeat in 1916, Collins sees that engaging in by-the-book warfare against the British occupiers would be a losing proposition. His solution was planting bombs and delivering wholesale death and destruction to the enemies of Irish autonomy. Many people died.

He genuinely regrets having been "forced" into such action. He says so repeatedly to his best friend and fellow combatant Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn, with a valiant but shaky accent). But he seems to have no regrets when he uses information offered by a sympathetic policeman, played by Stephen Rea, who helps Collins eradicate enemies of freedom.

The worst nightmare for a good man is to find himself in a position where he must defend the wrong policy for the right reasons. When the British, fearing more terrorism, agreed to talks, Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman), the Republic's president in exile, sends Collins to negotiate on his behalf. Collins, who knows he's no diplomat, understands that he's being set up to take the fall for De Valera.

The best Collins could negotiate was self-government for the south of Ireland with an oath of allegiance to the Crown still required. He found himself defending a pact that he insisted was a step in the right direction even if it wasn't the complete freedom he and his fellows had been fighting for. De Valera denounced Collins. Harry broke with him.

Now Jordan gives us a new Collins. In the old days he ran around planning bombings in scruffy clothes. Since the agreement with the British, he's in a shiny military uniform, pleading with his countrymen to make amends with the occupying forces. It's tough not to envision Collins as a German officer who thinks Hitler's all right because, after all, his life has improved since the Nazis came in.

Of course, Collins was no fascist, but the political expedience he backed hasn't exactly brought peace to the region in the last 70 years.

As if Jordan were slightly embarrassed about making a movie with a terrorist for a hero, Jordan issued a

"statement" in which he attempts to justify Collins' work by saying he "developed techniques of guerrilla warfare later copied by independence movements around the world," namely those of "Yitzhak Shamir in Israel" and "Mao Tse-tung in China." Jordan doesn't linger over the fact that things haven't turned out too well in those places as far as putting an end to violence goes. He also underscores that "Collins would never be a proponent of contemporary terrorism as practiced today." Collins only killed British intelligence officers and spies, not civilians. You don't know this just from watching the film.

The question is how do the Irish view Collins: as the fellow who bombed the British out of Ireland, or as the one who insisted that the bombing he started must stop? Some Irish view both Collins and De Valera as sellouts. Jordan says he means to celebrate Collins "the statesman and, ultimately, man of peace." I'm not sure he succeeds.

As for the cinematic value of "Michael Collins," I hold a movie about another flawed historical figure as the standard to which Jordan might compare his work. Despite the efforts of talented cinematographer Chris Menges, let's just say that "Michael Collins" is no "Lawrence of Arabia."

A filmmaker of Jordan's capability is not likely to make anything less than a competent, watchable movie, and that

"Michael Collins" is. I think content rather than form detracts from the cogency of the finished product in this case. All that I knew about Collins before I saw this movie was that he was an Irish hero. Jordan didn't so much show us how Collins was a hero, but rather leave us with a disturbing ambivalence about what being a hero means.

"Lawrence of Arabia" accomplished the same thing, but I enjoyed it more.